A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

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Life’ll Kill Ya: Class Division, Shit-Life Syndrome, and the Market-Communism of the Nordic Countries

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Idea: Copy what works.

Life can be good. We have evidence of this. We’re just not sure how to make it happen. In part, this is because we’re not really sure who “we” are. Will Hutton, writing for the Guardian, talks about Britain, Brexit, and ‘Shit-Life Syndrome.'” He notes that this shit-life syndrome in Britain parallels a lot of the suffering in the U.S. (wherein lower class white folks are starting, more often, to be afflicted with the same problems non-whites have suffered from). Hutton says that the decline in life-expectancy in Britain is starting to look like the worse problems we have in the U.S. A recent study indicates that, in the U.S.,  “all cause mortality increased… among non-Hispanic whites.” Drug overdoses were the leading cause but mortality also increased for “alcohol-related conditions, suicides and organ diseases involving multiple body systems” (notably liver, heart diseases and cancers).

US doctors coined a phrase for this condition: “shit-life syndrome”. Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security. They are trapped in poor neighbourhoods where the prospect of owning a home is a distant dream. There is little social housing, scant income support and contingent access to healthcare. Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.

Hutton says that white people afflicted with shit-life syndrome are Trump’s base and the core of Brexit supporters. They respond to accusations that their woes are caused by dark foreigners. Meanwhile, suggestions that the Nordic countries have managed to create a system where their citizens are happier and more prosperous are met with dismissive responses about how the countries are communist.

Hutton doesn’t really get into it, but that’s not the only rejoinder about why we can’t have the good life enjoyed in the Nordic countries. There was another column in the New York Magazine by Eric Levitz entitled “Conservatives can’t decide if Nordic Socialism is a totalitarian nightmare or actually capitalist.” Levitz observes that the traditional conservative notion is that the Nordic countries are totalitarian nightmares. As a representative sample, Levitz references a recent piece by Noah Rothman wherein Rothman argues that single-payer healthcare and tuition free access to a university education are pillars of the Soviet Constitution. However, they are also features of Scandinavian government and Rothman apparently feels no need to explain why those ideas lead to the gulag rather than to, say, Denmark.

Democrats may think they “can control the monster they’re bringing back to life,” Rothman writes, but if socialists are given an opportunity to prevail at the polls, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer “will find themselves prisoners to their party’s collectivists soon enough. After all, taking captives is what socialism does best.”

Levitz can’t resist twisting the knife a little bit by mentioning that the American system is way better at incarcerating its citizens than these socialist countries. At the same time as conservatives are making these gulag-socialism arguments, other conservatives are making incompatible arguments about how Nordic socialism is actually capitalism. According to this version of the argument, ” the real secret of the Nordic country’s success lies in its ‘strong protection of property rights and the integrity of the legal system,’ along with its commitment to free trade, light touch with regulations, and the fact that its ‘labor market is very flexible: there is no legislated minimum wage, and there are few restrictions on hiring and firing.'” Levitz rejoinder to this is that, even if we accept that Denmark’s welfare state isn’t responsible for its strong economic growth, “there’s little question that the country’s aberrantly high levels of social spending are responsible for its exceptionally low levels of relative poverty and income inequality.” Levitz concludes that the implication of this argument is that:

The economic success of the Nordic countries is actually a testament to the vitality of free-market capitalism — because free-market capitalism is (apparently) totally compatible with giant welfare states, nearly universal private-sector unionization, and state-owned oil, telecoms, and financial services companies.

Snark aside, the relative success of the Nordic countries suggests that it’s possible to have substantial wealth transfers from rich to poor without crippling the economy. (Other places, of course, show that wealth transfers can be done in a way that cripples the economy.)

A couple of themes I’ve seen raised in similar contexts that don’t necessarily come up in Hutton or Levitz columns but seem relevant: a) People suffering from shit-life syndrome are lazy and make poor life decisions; and b) the success of Nordic countries has to do with “homogeneous” populations. Here’s the word dropped into a 2015 column by Jeff Jacoby. (Incidentaly, Jacoby goes with the option #2 ‘actually capitalist’ dismissal of Scandinavian socialism.)

The real key to Scandinavia’s unique successes isn’t socialism, it’s culture. Social trust and cohesion, a broad egalitarian ethic, a strong emphasis on work and responsibility, commitment to the rule of law — these are healthy attributes of a Nordic culture that was ingrained over centuries. In the region’s small and homogeneous countries (overwhelmingly white, Protestant, and native-born), those norms took deep root.

The connection between homogeneity and a successful social welfare state is usually left unstated as somehow self-evident, so I have to guess a bit at the rationale. The less charitable interpretation is just straight up racism. “Sure, you can have a successful system where the population is made up of hard-working white people. But, too great a population of the lazy mongrel races will suck us dry.” The not-great but probably more realistic connection between homogeneity and the success of a welfare state is that we’re more likely to feel comfortable spending money on people like us and more likely to resent spending money on people who are not “us.” Racism is probably the biggest stumbling block here. But it’s not the only one — there are other significant cultural divisions that also present challenges. If we think of our fellow citizens as “they” because those citizens look different, it’s going to be tougher to develop consensus about spending money on a strong social safety net. “Helping industrious people like us who are down on their luck is a great idea. Supporting lazy people like them will ruin us.”

So, the homogeneity argument is related to the one where people who suffer from shit life  syndrome do so because of laziness and poor life decisions. Why would we spend money to help those who refuse to help themselves? Don’t do drugs! Don’t have kids when you don’t have a job! Don’t have sex out of wedlock! Exercise every day! Don’t buy junk food! Do your homework! Don’t spend your money on luxuries! Don’t smoke! Save more money for retirement! Pay your credit cards off every month! The litany of admonitions is endless. It’s easy to make suffering the result of personal failings. But, as I’ve said many times — and it’s hardly original to me — the economy isn’t a morality play. There are plenty of hard working, sensible poor people; and there are plenty of wealthy people whose wealth is not at all proportional to their personal merit. The fact is that almost none of us are self-made. (Cue the howls of indignation from the people who foamed at President Obama’s unremarkable observation that if you were successful, you had someone help you along the way.)

I’ve never been too comfortable with any one ideology, but I suppose utilitarianism has been more or less my guide when judging whether a public system is good. If your system is mostly making people happy, it’s probably a good one. If your system is mostly making people unhappy, it’s probably a bad one. (But, yes, uncomfortable questions arise if you push this to the extremes. It has to be bounded by individual rights and protection for minority groups.) The success of these Nordic systems seems to be based on giving individuals more opportunity to succeed. It’s probably tougher for an individual to hit the economic jackpot and become a billionaire in the way that the American system makes possible. But, the flip side is that one doesn’t have to beat the odds in order to live a middle class lifestyle which also seems to be increasingly the case under the American system.

Fort Wayne News Sentinel: Last One Out, Turn Off the Lights

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Idea: Local journalists covering local beats for locally owned newspapers is probably the only viable long-term strategy for newspapers.

Kaitor Kay, writing for WANE, reports that the Fort Wayne News Sentinel is down to one employee, conservative columnist Kevin Leininger. Retention of Leininger apparently (or at least arguably) fulfills the News Sentinel’s obligations under a joint operating agreement with the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette originally signed in 1950. Under that agreement (per Wikipedia anyway), “each newspaper is separately managed and has separate editorial staffs, but Fort Wayne Newspapers provides advertising sales, circulation, and printing services used by both newspapers.” The agreement seems to have been updated about a year ago when the News-Sentinel stopped distributing a print edition and moved to digital only except that some print content was included with distribution of the Journal Gazette. In a statement released at the time, Mike Christman, the publisher, said, “the News-Sentinel will now have the ability to reach a wider range of audiences in Fort Wayne, while focusing exclusively on creating great, engaging content.” Maintaining its commitment to the unique character and voice of The News-Sentinel was a priority, Christman said. The updated agreement runs through 2075.

Less than a year later, however, the News-Sentinel abruptly laid off everyone but Leininger. The employees were called into a meeting and told that they were being let go. Per the WANE story:

Tom Davis, a current reporter and former sports editor for the newspaper, was one of the employees let go. He said they were called into a meeting for the announcement, adding that they “had no idea this was coming.”
. . .
The general manager at Fort Wayne Newspapers, Pete Van Baalen, would only confirm personnel changes, but did say the News-Sentinel would maintain their online presence, and its page inside the Journal Gazette.

I can’t pretend any deep familiarity with the Fort Wayne news market, but it came on my radar when I started blogging 13+ years ago. It was a decent size metro area with two substantial newspapers, and neither of them were part of the Gannett hive organism. That seemed like a throwback. I had a notion that the competition between the two papers made each of them better. And, again, I’m speculating, but the blog activity in the area was different and better than what I saw elsewhere. Pound-for-pound, the Fort Wayne blogosphere punched way above its weight. In my mind, that was related to the newspaper activity. I don’t know that one caused the other, but I had a general notion that whatever was in the water that made Fort Wayne a two newspaper town in an era when that had long stopped being the norm was also producing more blogs.

The blogs came and went, seemingly long ago. The News-Sentinel is going to live a shadow existence. (I’m envisioning Leininger as the Ancient Mariner aboard some kind of ghost ship). Hopefully, the Journal Gazette will be able to continue its good work and the News-Sentinel employees who lost their jobs will bounce back quickly. I continue to believe that, for newspapers to remain strong, they have to put local reporters on local beats. Certainly that’s more expensive than opinion columns, wire services, and classified ads, but if you don’t have boots on the ground as a local presence, you’re dispensable. All that other stuff, I can get from almost anyplace else in the world, but the local reporting is valuable to the community and difficult to replace. Which does not, of course, mean that non-local owners will give a damn. Local ownership probably wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Indiana Voucher System Hurts Math Education for Voucher Students

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Vouchers don’t work. Copy the methods of school systems in other countries that are outperforming our own.

A post from Diane Ravitch’s blog on a study from Joseph Waddington and Mark Berends. The Study is called, “Impact of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program: Achievement Effects for Students in Upper Elementary and Middle School.”

Overall, voucher students experienced an average achievement loss of 0.15 SDs in mathematics during their first year of attending a private school compared with matched students who remained in a public school. This loss persisted regardless of the length of time spent in a private school. In English/Language Arts, we did not observe statistically meaningful effects. Although school vouchers aim to provide greater educational opportunities for students, the goal of improving the academic performance of low?income students who use a voucher to move to a private school has not yet been realized in Indiana.

I do take issue with one of the study’s assumptions, however. The abstract says that improving the academic performance of low-income students is a goal. My contention has long been that this stated goal for Indiana’s voucher system is a pretext. My working theory is that the real goals are primarily: a) reduce the influence of teacher’s unions; b) redirect education money to friends and well-wishers of pro-voucher policymakers; and c) subsidize private, religious education.

A brief aside – I know that sounds cynical. And I’m not a fan of knee-jerk cynicism when it comes to politics. It’s too easy, corrosive to public discourse, and so often doesn’t capture what’s happening. Too many lawmakers and other policymakers — even those with whom I disagree — are subjected to being unfairly painted as these cartoonish supervillains by members of the public who can’t be bothered to deal with nuance. In my experience most public servants honestly have their hearts in the right place. So, I would be delighted to learn that my cynicism is misplaced. Maybe lawmakers will review these studies and reconsider the state voucher program. Maybe they’ll restructure their voucher initiatives in a way that’s contrary to the big three “real” reasons for vouchers I’ve listed above. If that happens, I’ll certainly reconsider my cynical take on the matter.

Ravitch also mentions a study by Robert Planta and Arya Ansari showing that apparent advantages of going to a private school disappear when one controls for socio-economic advantages of the kids going to those schools. In other words, the private school wasn’t particularly responsible for the high performance of the kids; the advantages the kids had outside the school were responsible.

[I]n unadjusted models, children with a history of enrollment in private schools performed better on nearly all outcomes assessed in adolescence. However, by simply controlling for the socio-demographic characteristics that selected children and families into these schools, all of the advantages of private school education were eliminated. There was also no evidence to suggest that low-income children, or children enrolled in urban schools, benefited more from private school enrollment.

So, we’re diverting funds from traditional public schools and adding administrative burdens for a voucher system that doesn’t help kids’ educational performance and might even hurt it. There are higher performing public school systems all over the world that we could be copying — but, doing so might not hurt teacher’s unions, might not redirect education funds to friends and well-wishers of voucher advocates, and might not provide a subsidy to private, religious education. The link in the previous system is to a blog post I did from 2016 on an National Conference of State Legislatures study that looked at Finland, Singapore, Ontario, Alberta, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, Shanghai, and Taiwan. My take aways from the report:

1. The U.S. is falling behind when compared to the rest of the world. This can’t be explained away by hand waving about apples-and-oranges.

2. The good news, of sorts, is that there are now lots of countries doing better than we are, so we don’t have to re-invent the wheel. We can see what works and copy it.

3. There needs to be a support structure in place so that kids come to school ready to learn. In other places, that can take the form of government support to families with young children or extended family structures or the community generally. The upshot is that the kids are healthy and the kids are being educated before they get to school. Extra resources are devoted to struggling kids once they get to school.

4. Access to elite teachers. The system recruits high quality educators; implements a rigorous system of preparation and licensure; pays them well; develops a mentor system; gives them a professional environment to work in; selects high quality administrators; and develop standards benchmarked to other countries.

5. Develop a Career and Technical Education path for those students preferring more of an applied education rather than a more academic approach. This shouldn’t be an educational backwater like so many vocational programs. It should be geared to boosting the national economy and providing a higher standard of living for a broader base of the population.

6. These reforms should be part of a comprehensive plan. It will probably be the case that not all problems can be tackled at once, but the plan implementation should not be erratic or arbitrary.

This may be simplistic, but my current thinking is that our biggest obstacle to achieving a world-class education system (and a world-class health system for that matter) is the legacy of centuries of slavery in the U.S. It has left the civic equivalent of psychological scars that results in social dysfunction and seemingly insurmountable division. “We” are perfectly happy to spend huge amounts of Our money to help Us. But, We get really parsimonious when They might get some of Our money. Places where the public mostly regards everyone in the country as Us have any easier time providing for the welfare of the general public (as the preamble to the Constitution puts it) than places where the public has a significant division between Us and Them.

Chicago Tribune: Indiana has the number one source of industrial lead pollution in the nation

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I love the smell of lead in the morning. Smells like . . . victory.

Michael Hawthorne, writing for the Chicago Tribune (and accessed by me via the South Bend Tribune) has a lead paragraph (no pun intended) that you probably never want to see in connection with your company:

The nation’s largest source of industrial lead pollution is 20 miles down the Lake Michigan shore from Chicago in Indiana, churning more than twice as much of the brain-damaging metal into the air each year as all other factories in the region combined.

This is in relation to ArcerlorMittal’s Burns Harbor plant. According to the article, the plant emitted nearly 18,000 pounds of lead and has topped the list since 2013.

I suppose this is as good a place as any for my occasional rant about how libertarians and free marketers don’t tend to have a good answer for pollution. They chafe against environmental regulations. But without such regulations, it’s difficult to avoid infringing on the rights of others and preserving the efficiency of the market. Without such regulations, it’s cheaper to pollute the air that others breathe than to dispose of the waste from your manufacturing process in a manner that doesn’t harm others.

By emitting the pollutants, you’re harming others, but usually your doing it in a way that is subtle and difficult to prove. When you  punch someone in the nose, you know it immediately, and it’s a pretty simple thing to attribute the damaged nose to the person who punched you. The criminal law imposes penalties against the person throwing the punch and the civil law gives you the opportunity to collect damages against the person. With a polluter, whether the pollution constitutes a crime is more ambiguous; proving damages is more difficult; and, the legal protections of the corporate form shield the polluter from individual liability.

Meanwhile, pollution means that the market is getting incomplete information about the cost of (in this case) the steel being produced. They offload some of the costs of their production onto the people suffering brain damage from the lead pollution. Those people are, in effect, subsidizing the cost of production. Because the cost of the pollution is not reflected in the price of the steel, the market gets the signal that this form of production is more efficient than it really is. Polluters are rewarded and, consequently, environmentally sound production processes are put at a competitive disadvantage because they don’t force nearby residents to subsidize the process by breathing in the tainted air.

That said, it also bears mentioning that industry generally and the steel industry in particular has gotten cleaner over the years. It’s certainly not perfect, there are outliers and backsliding and more work to be done, but compare pollution now to pollution 25 or 50 years ago, and it seems clear that progress has been made. I would argue that such progress is in no small part because of environmental regulations.

The Kids are All Right: Part the Millionth

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Bands gathering on the track awaiting the results of the first session.

I know I don’t write that much here anymore, and often when I do it’s to push back against the idea that “kids these days” are somehow defective. But, like Paul McCartney said when he finally freed himself of that Beatles albatross and joined the Wings juggernaut, “what’s wrong with that, I’d like to know, because here I go, again.”

Yesterday, I went to the Indiana State Fair for band day. My son is a member of The Sound of West Side Marching Band. For the past two weeks, those kids just busted their collective asses from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday, more practice the first Friday followed by a competition in Noblesville that night that brought them home around midnight, more practice the second Friday from 8 a.m. through 4:30 in the afternoon, and then a State Fair band day that had them reporting at 10 a.m. and getting back at about 1:15 a.m. Sunday morning. This is during summer vacation. With that work, they placed 11th at the State band competition. Clearly I’m biased and proud of those kids. But we were just one school with one band. All over the state, there are kids putting in similar kinds of effort. I don’t know what they’re putting in the water in Wayne County, but their bands made up 25% of the top 16: Richmond, Northeastern, Hagerstown, and Centerville. One of my favorites last night, Winchester, isn’t too far away in Randolph County. And — while I have no background in this stuff and don’t necessarily have an expert eye – Jay County, Anderson, and champion Noblesville seemed to be a cut above the other outstanding schools. (Oh, and honorable mention to Monroe Central which didn’t compete in the night show, but led the 1-A schools and just killed it, particularly when you consider how few kids they probably have to work with.)

And that’s just the bands. One of the things I’ll miss next year when my daughter is in the marching band is walking the exhibit halls with her. These are halls filled with the winning crafts and projects. Kids all over the state are doing great work. (One of the categories this year was aerospace — I was hoping Tippecanoe County would dominate, but no such luck!) Beyond a quick trip through the cow barns, I didn’t even get to the livestock, which similarly consumes a great deal of time for the “kids these days.”

Sure, you can say I’m cherry-picking because only a small percentage of kids are involved in the things I’ve mentioned above. But, I think I’m less guilty of cherry-picking here than those who bellyache about how kids are “these days.” What’s the ratio of band kids to kids who eat tide pods? Which have you heard more about this year? And, in a slightly different way, it’s cherry-picking when the oldsters use the past as a comparison. Nostalgia has softened the bad parts and enhanced the good parts. So, it’s easy to miss the improvements that have taken place over time. The improvements are subtle and whereas the negatives tend to stand out. But, in what other time and place would you really prefer living? If you love sanitation and dislike polio, your options are limited. I’m an educated, upper middle class white guy living in the United States, and I struggle to think of a time period more than, say, 20 years ago when I’d prefer to live.  Other than, maybe blue collar white guys from the United States, I doubt there are many other demographics who can say things were better for them at other time periods either.

Encourage your kids. Be proud of them. Be hopeful for the future. I figure one mark of good parenting is producing a child who is more capable than you were. It should be the fervent hope of each generation that the next generation will be an improvement on their own. That, more than victory in war, rising skylines, accumulated wealth, or even a moon-landing, is a mark of greatness. And that, my friends, is why we have band day at the State Fair!

Privatized Profit, Socialized Risk: Kiel Bros and the Pence Family

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Brian Slodysko, writing for the Associated Press, reports that the State of Indiana has had to spend $21 million and counting on the cleanup of Kiel Bros. Oil Company sites. The company operated widely under the name “Tobacco Road.”

The collapse of Kiel Bros. Oil Co. in 2004 was widely publicized. Less known is that the state of Indiana — and, to a smaller extent, Kentucky and Illinois — are still on the hook for millions of dollars to clean up more than 85 contaminated sites across the three states, including underground tanks that leaked toxic chemicals into soil, streams and wells.

Indiana alone has spent at least $21 million on the cleanup thus far, or an average of about $500,000 per site, according to an analysis of records by The Associated Press. And the work is nowhere near complete.

The federal government, meanwhile, plans to clean up a plume of cancer-causing solvent discovered beneath a former Kiel Bros. station that threatens drinking water near the Pence family’s hometown.

Mike Pence is, of course, the Vice President and former governor of Indiana. His brother, Greg Pence, is the GOP candidate to take Mike’s former seat in Congress. Greg was running the company when it went bankrupt in 2004. According to the AP report, the company was founded by Carl Kiel in the 1960s. Pence father, Edward, became corporate vice-president. Mike and Greg worked for the company as well with Greg eventually became president of the company after Edward died in 1988.

The corporate bankruptcy filing and environmental damage in this story underlie a lot of what I find problematic about conservative and libertarian rhetoric about personal responsibility and small government. The rhetoric often involves a lot of talk about personal responsibility, the evils of government, and the wisdom of allowing people to keep their money away from the prying hands of the state. And, you know, that sounds great. Often there is truth to it. But it’s far too simplistic.

Let’s start with the corporation. It is a legal fiction created by and made available by the government and enforced by the government to shield individuals from personal responsibility. The individuals who owned Kiel Bros. were thereby allowed to cause damage to the environment, presumably pocket money from those activities, then retain the money after the bankruptcy was filed and the damage came to light. Bankruptcy is similar — a government created loophole to the enforceability of government created property rights that shields people from their obligations.

Then there is the environmental damage. Libertarians in particular, but often conservatives as well, have always been very weak in terms of their ability to reconcile their philosophy with an ability to deal with pollution. The general notion is that property owners should be allowed to do what they want with their own property without government interference (putting aside for a moment the fact that property is a legal creation that has no practical existence without the force of the government backing it up.) They might generally assert that if pollution caused by someone else’s property hurts you, you should be able to recover damages to compensate you. But, in practice, the culprits can be long gone before the damage comes to light, and the problems of proof and recovery can be immense. Meanwhile, pollution distorts the marketplace which is generally held in high regard by libertarians and conservatives. If you pollute, you are externalizing the costs of your operations. Operations cost more if they’re done in a way that doesn’t contaminate other people’s air and water. Because you’ve externalized that cost, the cost is not reflected in the price of your product. So, the market doesn’t get accurate information about the true cost of the service or product and money flows to people who are externalizing their costs. In this case, money is flowing to the Kiel and Pence families rather than to other oil companies or energy producers who create their product without surreptitiously harming others.

Which brings us to the last point about allowing people to keep what they’ve earned. If the State were to raise taxes on the Pence family to help mitigate these environmental costs, they would definitely moan about big government. I don’t know if they’d go so far as to say “taxation is theft,” but there is definitely a libertarian contingent who goes that far. Can the Pence family be said to have “earned” money that comes, in part, from offloading the environmental costs of their operation? They’ve earned some but not all of it. And I think that’s probably true of a lot of economic activity and its relationship to government and society at large. It’s complicated. You’ve earned some but not all of it. Sometimes you’ve offloaded costs. Sometimes you’ve skimmed off the value created by an employee. Sometimes you’re profiting from the infrastructure put in place by the government. So, sometimes taxes are too high. Sometimes, they’re too low. And, in any event, calling taxation theft just doesn’t capture the true dynamic.

Needle Exchanges in the News

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I won’t say too much about this since it involves a local issue where I might be called upon professionally, but I saw two mentions of needle exchange programs in the news, back-to-back, and it seemed worth noting.

Scott Miley, reporting for CNHI, had an article about recommendations as to where potential opioid settlement money should go. (The lawsuits are fairly fresh, so discussions about settlement money might be a little premature). In that article, there was a discussion of needle exchanges:

The IU study also suggests that policymakers recognize the critical importance of syringe exchange and similar safe-space programs, which can provide Naloxone and treatment options.

“The state’s syringe exchange program (SEP) remains incoherent with major county-by-county variations,” the report states. “This is despite the clear evidence base for exchanges as recognized by, for example, the Surgeon-General’s Report (of 2016), their proven role in reducing the transmission of HIV/AIDS and overall cost effectiveness.”

Researcher Ross Silverman, professor of health policy and management, said that syringe and safe-space programs need to build trust with their communities. But policymakers, too, should evaluate Indiana law affecting those trying to seek help for addictions.

“The way that Indiana law is structured, when an individual can now be charged with a level 6 felony for possession of drug paraphernalia, sends a very contrary message to getting people to be actively involved in syringe exchange programs,” Silverman said.

The other story I happened to see was on the local Tippecanoe County needle exchange program, written by Jeong Park for the Lafayette Journal & Courier. There have been a variety of objections to that program locally, mostly centering on either the location of the program or on whether this encourages drug use. Fear of dirty needles has also been a prominent concern. This report is on the rate of return of needles to the program which is apparently up since the program’s inception last summer.

About 14,000 out of 19,700 needles given out have been returned as of March 31, according to the data released Thursday. That’s a return rate of 71 percent, an 11.5 percentage point increase from about four months ago. The county expects the rate to increase as more return to the program.

As of March 31, 230 people have used the program, an increase from 138 as of Dec. 31.

“We’ve been a bit surprised,” said Tippecanoe County’s health officer Jeremy Adler. “It’s a reflection of how bad the epidemic has hit our community. It’s an eye-opening number.”

Gateway to Hope, the needle exchange program, started in August to address the hepatitis C epidemic and other health challenges that come with the opioid crisis.

 

More gas-soaked wood is not the answer to our fire problems

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Kerosene is not the answer.

Our cities used to have horrible problems with fires because of, among other things, how the buildings were constructed. Building codes were enacted and have reduced our problems with fires considerably.

The American people have a fundamental right to property. Sure, those codes infringe upon property rights to some extent. But the government did not take away all private property. Fires did not go away entirely. There are still arsonists. But fires are harder to start and don’t spread as rapidly.

As a society, we are much better at talking about what limitations on property rights are appropriate and necessary to a properly functioning society. Those discussions and the resulting decisions are not universally loved. People often chafe at zoning requirements and other limitations, but it’s a disagreement about where the line should be drawn — not (generally) a line about whether the government should have such authority at all. Our ability to talk about proper firearm limitations is much more dysfunctional. I think that has to do with firearms having become something of a tribal totem, the presence or absence of which makes a person a part of the In-Group or part of The Other. When The Other tells you how you must or must not define the boundaries of a right, it provokes a much more emotional response than when the discussion is just a disagreement among members of your group.

In any event, the right to bear arms is no more sacrosanct than the right to property. Firearms are causing a lot more deaths in our country than in others. You can point to things like mental health or evil as “the reason,” but for those to be the primary problem, you’d have to conclude that Americans are uniquely mentally ill or evil, which I don’t believe to be the case. We are unique in the ease with which our citizens can acquire firearms that are effective at killing many people rapidly. So regulation is necessary and appropriate. “Regulated” is right there in the Second Amendment.

We have a problem. It’s a problem other countries don’t seem to have. We need more and/or different regulation. The question is what that regulation should look like. (And, while there are some suggesting that “more guns” is the answer; to me that sounds like someone addressing those conflagrations in cities and — rather than building codes — suggest stocking up on more gas-soaked wood.) I don’t pretend to have particular insights into what would help. A first step is probably loosening the restrictions that have made it difficult or for the CDC to study the issue of gun violence. I have also suggested an insurance regime for ownership of firearms which might help bring market forces to bear on the problem. Of course, none of this is going to work if America’s gun owners are in a defensive crouch. There are a lot of them, and they know a lot more about firearms than I do. But, I don’t know how we persuade them to be part of the solution.

Live Humbly

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The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

This quote is from J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” I didn’t much care for the book in general, but that quote stuck with me. In fact, it was the subject of discussion in a college English class. It made me surprisingly indignant; I suppose because it belittled as immature things that I supposed to be heroism — going out in a blaze of glory, and all of that. Oddly, I felt like something was being taken away from me even though I had no immediate plans in that direction. In retrospect, I was (as Krusty said of Sideshow Raheem) an angry, angry young man.

The emotional fires of adolescence have cooled, so it’s easier for me to regard this vision of maturity in a positive way. The most recent massacre in Florida is what brought this to mind again. But, it has broader application outside of the gun debate. As a culture, we seem to celebrate dying nobly a whole lot more than we celebrate living humbly even though the latter is generally more beneficial to society over the long term. It’s tough to live humbly though. There’s no particular glory in it. It means grinding out small gains over the long term in a universe that is vast, apathetic, and frequently arbitrary. That certainly does not have the emotional punch of being the bright star of a short but exciting story where you are heroically battling the evil arrayed against you — or at least taking decisive revenge against those who have wronged you. But, ultimately, living humbly is the right thing to do. We should make more of an effort to value and celebrate those who do it well.

 

SB 25: Termination of Local Government Defined Benefit Plans

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SB 25, introduced by Senator Boots, would require that a political subdivision’s defined benefit plan (pension plan) be terminated if the political subdivision fails to make the full, actuarial determined contribution to the plan for three consecutive years. The fiscal impact statement makes this seem like maybe not such a great idea.  The note indicates that plans are subject to IRS rules for termination, is skeptical that plans would have sufficient funding to provide the required member benefits and annuities, and suggests that litigation would follow. On the upside, the 2016 Local Pension Report indicates only two political subdivisions that have not made the required payments in the last three years. (Unfortunately the fiscal note does not indicate which two political subdivisions.)

I suppose the intent is to add some pressure to political subdivisions to make sure they don’t get too far behind on their pension obligations. But, this seems like a Procrustean solution that would ultimately do more harm than good if it was ever triggered.